Category: Business Insider

• Israel has never been impressed with the US-made Patriot air defense system.
• In 1991, it failed to intercept nearly all of the Iraqi Scud missiles fired at Israeli cities.
• Israel may not need the Patriots, but Ukraine is pleading for more. 

Israel has never been satisfied with its version of the Patriot air defense system that Ukraine views as essential to its survival.

This creates a bizarre split screen where Ukraine was all but pleading for more Patriot missiles to defend its cities and forces on Monday even as Israel began to shut down its older Patriot batteries, a move that came less than a month after it battled an unprecedented missile barrage from Iran.

Israel and Ukraine's experience with the Patriots could not have been more different. Israel first used Patriots in combat in 1991 against approximately 40 Scud ballistic missiles that Iraq fired at its cities. While the bombardments did not kill large numbers of people, Israel was disappointed with the Patriot's pitiful performance, with officials estimating it shot down only one or possibly even zero Scuds.

Israel wouldn't use the Patriot in combat again until the 2010s when it shot down drones and a Su-24 bomber coming from Syria. By then, the Patriot had become a very different system. Its early failures, including against Iraqi Scuds, led to an extensive system upgrade and missiles with an active radar seeker that directly strike the target to destroy it with kinetic energy. These newer "hit-to-kill" missiles, the PAC-3, are estimated to cost around $4 million each. Their less sophisticated PAC-2 predecessor, on the other hand, are proximity-fusing missiles that explode near incoming missiles to eliminate them.

Since receiving its Patriots, with both PAC-2 and PAC-3 interceptor missiles, in early 2023, Ukraine has successfully used them to shoot down Russia's Kinzhal missile, which Russia touted as an unstoppable hypersonic weapon, and, early this year, moved at least one launcher near the front lines and shot down a dozen of Russia's best fighter jets.

The Patriot is only part of Israel's missile shield that's been heavily tested by Iran and its proxies in the wake of Hamas' Oct. 7 terror attacks. Israel has other options that are cheaper or built inside its country.

"Israel has long been looking for a more advanced and more indigenous system to supplement or replace the Patriot, not only given its service history but also the supply chain that it requires," Ryan Bohl, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at the risk intelligence company RANE, told Business Insider.

"That this comes not long after Iran's barrage of missiles against Israel isn't a huge surprise with that ongoing trend," Bohl said. "I think Israel views the Patriot as out of date and too expensive to keep up with given the breakthroughs that were demonstrated during that barrage by newer systems."

Federico Borsari, a defense expert at the Center for European Policy Analysis, also believes Israel's development of more advanced anti-missile systems weighed heavily on its decision to retire the Patriot.

"Israel's decision to retire its Patriot PAC-2 fire units is in line with the process of modernization and progressive enhancement of its air defense architecture with more advanced capabilities, in particular Iron Dome and David's Sling," Borsari told BI.

"The latter's Stunner missile, in particular, has a longer engagement range against aerodynamic threats (up to 300 km according to publicly available specifications) compared to the 160 km of the PAC-2's GEM-T missiles," Borsari said. "The two systems have a similar engagement range for ballistic threats, although David's Slings maximum range capability is likely higher than the Patriot's PAC-3 missiles."

The CEPA analyst noted that David's Sling truck-mounted ELM-2084 radar adds "maneuverability and rapid redeployment" advantages.

"David's Sling interceptors are also designed to counter saturation, multi-threat attacks like the recent one launched by Iran, thanks to their integration with the shorter-range Iron Dome," Borsari said.

Bohl pointed out the David's Sling is effective for intercepting "low-flying attacks and/or tracking enemy projectiles."

He also noted that the Stunner missile is significantly cheaper and, therefore, more cost-effective than its Patriot counterpart.

Israel previously refused a US request for its vintage Hawk missiles, long in storage and out of service, for Ukraine.

Analysts believe that might not necessarily be the case with the Patriots.

"I think it remains entirely possible that Israel countenances a potential transfer of these Patriots back to the United States and hence on to Ukraine from there," Bohl said. "Certainly, from the Israeli perspective, they would consider this fair play, as Russia's war in Ukraine has helped to dry up the much-needed 155 mm ammunition that Israel itself has required."

If the Patriots don't ultimately end up in Ukraine, it's not inconceivable they could be transferred to a regional country. Jordan requested the US deploy a Patriot missile on its soil in October and helped intercept the Iranian barrage on April 13.

"Transferring these Patriots to other third-party countries like Jordan or even Gulf Arab allies like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, or even Saudi Arabia, I think is also in the cards as the United States looks to bolster air defenses region-wide," Bohl said.

Borsari argues it is crucial for the US and the European countries to acquire the Israeli PAC-2 batteries for Ukraine.

"While not sufficient to cover the entire front, they would significantly enhance Ukraine's air defense as Russia increases its terrorist attacks against Ukrainian cities," Borsari said. "While Israel has so far resisted calls to provide Ukraine with military support, pressure from the US and others could allow for this transfer."

"Handing over to Jordan is also possible, although, given the circumstances, Western countries would and should prioritize Ukraine."

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• Mexico native Rogelio Villarreal Jasso said he purchased diamond-and-gold Cartier earrings online for $13.
• He said the cheap price resulted from a website glitch, and Cartier attempted to cancel his order.
• But after contacting Mexico's federal consumer protection agency, Jasso received his jewelry.

Rogelio Villarreal Jasso got extremely lucky when he found heavily discounted Cartier earrings online.

He was even more fortunate when he was allowed to keep the two pairs he purchased.

On December 1, 2023, the Mexico native noticed an Instagram advertisement for gold-and-diamond Cartier earrings priced at 232 pesos, or about $13, he told Business Insider.

The earrings — in Cartier's Clash style — originally retailed for 232,000 pesos, or about $13,675, so Jasso said he ordered two pairs.

But then Cartier tried to intervene, he said.

Jasso told BI he received a call from the luxury jewelry brand days later and was told that his order would be canceled because the online price wasn't correct.

He said Cartier apologized and offered to send him Champagne and a card holder — which he refused. Cartier did not respond to a request for comment from BI.

Instead, Jasso said he reviewed the terms and conditions of Cartier's Mexico site, where he found that the brand directs customers to the Office of the Federal Prosecutor for the Consumer if they have issues with orders.

According to The New York Times, he filed a complaint with the federal consumer protection agency, citing one of the country's consumer protection laws, which states that a supplier can be taken to court if the terms and conditions of a given purchase aren't upheld.

The agency did not respond to a request for comment from BI.

The Times reported that the complaint led to the agency contacting Cartier to mediate an agreement. Though the agency declined to share details with the publication while the case was ongoing, Jasso told the Times that a meeting was scheduled for next week.

But it wasn't necessary. After being contacted by the agency, Cartier seemingly took matters into its own hands and settled the issue by sending Jasso his order.

At the end of April, he shared photos of a Cartier package on X featuring two wrapped boxes with the brand's signature wax seals inside.

Now, he said, the earrings are officially his — much to the dismay of Mexican senator Lilly Téllez, who accused Jasso of taking advantage of Cartier and argued that he shouldn't have done so "even if the law supports you."

"It is more important to be honorable than to have Cartier earrings," she wrote.

As the Times reported, consumer complaints against businesses that change product prices are common in Mexico, which is likely the root of the senator's frustration.

But Jasso is thrilled about his purchase.

He told BI that he plans to keep one pair for himself solely as a memory of this experience and has decided to give the other to his mother because "she really deserves it."

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• Many influencers seek out talent managers to help them grow their brands and make more money.
• Business Insider is seeking nominations for rising stars in influencer talent management. 
• Please submit your nominations by Thursday, May 9 through this form or below.

Not all influencers build brands solely on their own.

After gaining thousands of followers on platforms like TikTok and YouTube, some creators turn to talent-management agencies for help negotiating deals or launching ambitious initiatives.

While some managers have rosters of clients from various categories, such as education, fashion, and healthcare, others are focused on specific criteria, like exclusively representing creators from diverse backgrounds or those with smaller audiences.

"You generally see slightly more equity in influencer pay when a creator reaches a certain follower tier and is able to secure a management team equipped to help them secure higher-paying, higher-quality brand deals," Brittany Bright, founder of The Influencer League, previously told Business Insider.

Some talent managers have recently come into the spotlight in the past few years, representing some of the most sought-after influencers or helping their clients execute particularly successful partnerships. Some are also helping brainstorm solutions to looming issues in the industry, such as the potential TikTok ban, or figuring out how to grow their audiences on newer platforms like Threads, which just introduced cash bonuses for creators. These managers might not be as well established as their more experienced counterparts, but they're introducing fresh ideas that are making their talent stand out.

BI is seeking nominations for this year's rising stars in talent management. Nominees must have no more than three years of experience in the creator economy, work for an established talent-management agency,  be based out of the US or the UK, and have contributed to their talent's success in a meaningful manner, as determined by BI's team.

Please submit your nominations by Thursday, May 9 through this form or below.

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• Kirra Dickinson, 28, ditched corporate life in 2022 for her mental health and to create content. 
• She chose to "descend the corporate ladder," a phrase a millennial comedian coined on TikTok. 
• A career coach says it's common among millennials and Gen Zers uninspired by their career paths.

Despite years of believing it was the only path, a Los Angeles-based millennial decided against climbing the corporate ladder. Now, she's happier than ever.

Kirra Dickinson, a 27-year-old content creator and manifestation coach, told Business Insider she spent years in technology research after graduating from UC Berkeley. Growing up, she felt "a lot of pressure" to get a traditional job to support herself and her family financially.

So, that's exactly what she did post-college. Her first job was as a design strategist for Fidelity in Boston before she pivoted to UX research. Eventually, she said she landed a job at Salesforce in Southern California.

When Dickinson was 26 and "reaching a peak" in her career, she found herself completely uninspired with work, to the point it was affecting her mental health.

"All I was thinking of is, 'Oh my gosh, this is going to suck. And I really don't want to do this. I really don't want to work with these people,'" she said.

At the same time, Dickinson was building a following on social media, posting lifestyle content, reviews, and tutorials, and getting a few brand deals here and there.

In 2022, she took a leap. "I was like, 'If I can pay my bills, that's fine. I have enough in savings and reserve investments. So we're just going to do an experiment and are going to quit corporate for a year," she said. "'If I don't like it, I can always come back.'"

Uninspiring leadership and the gig economy are drawing young professionals away from the corporate ladder

Dickinson is among many young professionals disillusioned by corporate life and the lack of work-life balance it can sometimes entail.

Octavia Goredema, a career coach and author of the book "Prep, Push, Pivot: Essential Career Strategies for Underrepresented Women" told BI she's increasingly noticing millennials and Gen Zers gravitating to the gig economy outside their 9-to-5 jobs, contributing to a general lack of ambition to climb the corporate ladder.

"Maybe they're investing, maybe they're working on a venture with friends on the weekends, maybe there's another skill that they have that they monetize in some way," Goredema said.

She also often hears younger clients say they don't want to become managers because it looks more stressful than it's worth.

"When they look above them at the roles that they could move into, in theory, they don't see anything that looks appealing," she said, adding that usually, it's because company leaders appear visibly under pressure and under-supported.

Anti-corporate ladder sentiment is also rife on social media. On April 7, New York-based comedian Aaron Yin posted a TikTok describing his career ambitions — or lack thereof.

In the video, which has over 1.1 million views, Yin said he is electing to "descend the corporate ladder" to better his health.

While he acknowledged some people aspire to be managers and to get "chewed out" by a CEO, he said he isn't one of them.

Yin said he doesn't want to be promoted or make more money because the added stress would mean spending more on "therapy and food."

Yin did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. However, his video prompted a surge of comments from users who said they, too, have chosen not to climb the corporate ladder to prioritize their happiness.

Like some commentators on Yin's video, Dickinson said she felt "relieved" after ditching the corporate ladder.

Not only that — she said she wound up making more money than her Salesforce salary after signing a deal with modeling agency NEXT, dedicating her time to coaching clients on manifestation, and launching a podcast.

"It is hard to walk away from that security," Dickinson said, referring to the corporate world. Still, she has no regrets about doing so to ride the "roller coaster" of an untraditional career path.

"It keeps things fresh," Dickinson said.

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• Applications to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program are paused through July.
• It's a result of the program's transition away from servicer MOHELA to several federal servicers.
• During this time, borrowers can still submit applications, but they will not be processed.

Some student-loan borrowers hoping for debt relief might have to wait a few months.

Beginning on May 1, the Education Department placed a pause on any processing of applications to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which forgives student debt for government and nonprofit workers after ten years of qualifying payments.

This pause is happening to allow PSLF accounts to be transferred away from student-loan company MOHELA, which was previously the sole servicer tasked with managing the program. During this transition, several different companies will assume management over PSLF accounts, but borrowers will be able to check their PSLF status directly through studentaid.gov rather than through one of the servicers.

The transition is expected to be completed in July, after which borrowers will regain access to their account information. In the meantime, though, while borrowers can still submit PSLF applications, they will not be processed until the pause ends, and they will also be unable to access their PSLF history on MOHELA's portal.

Payments are also still due for borrowers during this period.

This transition is part of the Education Department's efforts to make the student-loan repayment system easier for borrowers to access. As Business Insider previously reported, many borrowers in PSLF have encountered challenges with MOHELA, including inaccurate payment counts toward PSLF, and strained servicer resources meant it was difficult for borrowers to get ahold of customer service.

The department has worked over the past few years to update borrowers' accounts and bring them closer to forgiveness — or discharge their loans if they met their qualifying payments — and the web streamlining is intended to improve the user experience on the front end.

Most recently, the department canceled $300 million in student debt for 4,600 PSLF borrowers, bringing the total debt relief through PSLF to $62.8 billion for 876,000 borrowers.

Still, it remains to be seen how effectively this transition will be completed. Additionally, BI first reported on Monday that MOHELA requested that over a million borrowers be transitioned from its portfolio to other servicers in the hopes that it could provide better service with a lighter load.

The Education Department agreed, and impacted borrowers have started receiving notices from MOHELA and their new servicer informing them of the change. In the meantime, the department has vowed to enforce oversight over servicers to ensure they are continuing to fulfill their contractual obligations to borrowers.

"The Department takes very seriously its responsibility to oversee servicers and ensure borrowers have a smooth and successful repayment experience," Federal Student Aid said in a recent blog post. "We will continue to monitor performance, communicate with servicers and borrowers, and take corrective action where needed."

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• Jeff Bezos spent nearly three decades at the helm of Amazon.
• His successor, Andy Jassy, has called him the "most unusual business leader of our era."
• Here's some of Bezos' most famous principles for running a team and business.

Andy Jassy has called him "arguably the most unusual business leader of our era."

In his 27 years at the helm of Amazon, Jeff Bezos taught his successor, Jassy, and others a lot about how to run one of the world's biggest businesses.

Here's some of the advice he's shared over the years about managing a team and company:

Think big picture

Bezos "always had a way of getting teams to think bigger," Jassy said at a 2017 talk.

"It was amazing to watch how many ideas came to him from teams — that I thought were really good ideas, and they were really good ideas — where Jeff kind of listened to them, thought about them and then really looked around corners and helped figure it out and said: 'Well, shouldn't we extend this idea? Shouldn't we look around this corner naturally to advance the idea beyond what we are thinking just now to really change the shape of what we've built?'" Jassy said.

"Big things start small. The biggest oak starts from an acorn," Bezos said in 2017.

Have high standards

Bezos' had high expectations that extended throughout the organization.

""When you run a big organization and you can't attend all of the meetings, you can set reasonably high standards — I'll say maybe even unreasonably high standards, reasonably high standards that people stretch to — it gives you a lot of leverage across the organization where you are not in all of those meetings," Jassy said.

Be "strategically patient and tactically impatient"

Bezos put an emphasis on speed while sticking to his long-term vision for the company.

"His conviction about long-term vision and where he wants to take something — and even when people tell him it is not possible, which by the way, all of the time people tell him it is not possible — he has a conviction about it and believes it is possible and is stubborn about that vision," Jassy said. "But, in the interim, even though it may take us a long time to get to where we want to go, he understands that speed disproportionately matters."

Determine meeting head count by 2 pizzas

Bezos famously employs a "two-pizza rule" for meetings: He limits them to only the number of people that could be fed with two pizzas.

He credits this with helping with productivity, speed, and collaboration.

Create narratives, not PowerPoints

Bezos has said Amazon has "the weirdest meeting culture you ever encounter." One of Bezos' meeting no-nos is PowerPoints, which he has banned in company meetings.

"For every meeting, someone from the meeting has prepared a six-page, narratively structured memo that has real sentences and topic sentences and verbs," he's said. "It's not just bullet points. It's supposed to create the context for the discussion we're about to have."

He's said his perfect meeting has days of prep and involves "a crisp document and a messy meeting."

In a 2004 email to his senior team, Bezos explained why he doesn't like PowerPoints.

"Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the innerconnectedness of ideas," he wrote.

Bezos makes sure meeting attendees read through the memos.

"We read in the room. Just like high-school kids, executives will bluff their way through the meeting as if they've read the memo. So you have to carve out time so everyone has actually read the memo — they are not just pretending," he said.

Bezos has also assigned summer reading to top executives before.

Get customer input

Bezos' email is public, and while it's hard to imagine the jet-setting centibillionaire responded to any customers, he says he sometimes forwarded their concerns or feedback to the relevant departments.

"I see most of those emails. I see them and I forward them to the executives in charge of the area with a question mark. It's shorthand [for], 'Can you look into this?' 'Why is this happening?'" he said in 2018.

Bezos made a big point at Amazon of being focused on "customer obsession, as opposed to competitor obsession."

"Often companies say they are focused on customers, but they really spend most of their energy reacting to and talking about competitors," he said.

In fact, much of Amazon's success can be traced back to Bezos soliciting customer input in the company's early days.

In 1997, Bezos emailed 1,000 customers asking what they'd like to see the company sell. One customer said they wished Bezos sold windshield wiper blades because they needed new ones.

"I thought to myself, 'We can sell anything this way,'" Bezos said.

"Disagree and commit"

In his 2016 letter to shareholders, Bezos talked about the importance of the "disagree and commit" strategy in decision-making.

"If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there's no consensus, it's helpful to say, 'Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?' By the time you're at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you'll probably get a quick yes," he wrote.

Categorize decisions, and make them sooner than you think

Bezos wrote in his 2015 shareholder letter that he distinguishes Type 1 and Type 2 decisions. Type 1 decisions are high-impact and have a big influence on the company's strategy, while Type 2 decisions have lower stakes and can be more easily reversed if necessary.

Bezos says Type 1 decisions take up most of your time, while Type 2 decisions should be delegated or grouped with other smaller decisions for later.

Bezos believes you should make decisions with 70% of the information you wish you had, and iterate from there. He says he does this because if you waited for all of the data you wanted, you'd be acting too slowly.

In addition, Bezos likes to make decisions in the mornings.

"He said, 'Normally, I make important decisions around 10:30 a.m. I'll discuss it the day before, I'll sleep on it, and in the morning I'll actually make the decision,'" Italian fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli told The Wall Street Journal's Lane Florsheim in 2020.

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• The CEO and cofounder of Palantir isn't a fan of campus protests against Israel.
• He called the protests "pagan" and joked that some protesters should travel to North Korea.
• He also said he had "fantasies of using drone-enabled technology to exact revenge" on his enemies.

Alex Karp, the CEO and cofounder of Palantir, said at a high-profile Washington, DC-based event that he wants to send college student protesters to North Korea as part of an "exchange program" to give them perspective.

Politico was the first to report Karp's comments at The Hill and Valley Forum on Wednesday, which was live-streamed on YouTube. Other speakers at the event included the cofounder of AI startup Anthropic, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and several other members of Congress.

In a conversation about AI's impact on warfare in Ukraine and Israel, Jacob Helberg, the senior policy advisor to the CEO at Palantir, mentioned "pro-Hamas slogans" chanted at "very prestigious universities."

Karp claimed that some campus protesters were even pro-North Korean.

"We're gonna do an exchange program sponsored by Karp," he said. "A couple months in North Korea, nice-tasting flavored bark. See how you feel about that."

Earlier in the chat, Karp took a shot at anti-Israel protests at Columbia University, where NYPD officers arrested 300 protesters earlier this week.

"Look at Columbia," he said. "There is literally no way to explain the investment in our elite schools, and the output is a pagan religion — a pagan religion of mediocrity and discrimination and intolerance, and violence."

He added that he thinks a "double standard" has spread across campuses where protesters dedicate themselves to "an architecture of antidiscrimination while dressing in masks and excluding the population that's been most discriminated for the last 3,000 years."

Palantir did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

President Joe Biden commented Thursday morning on the protests in a press conference, saying they haven't led him to reconsider his stance on Israel.

Karp also said at the conference that he's fantasized about drone-striking his VC competitors.

"I historically have been one that would rage against Silicon Valley venture people," he said. "And I had all sorts of fantasies of using drone-enabled technology to exact revenge — especially targeted — in violation of all norms."

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• Hunterbrook Media is a hedge fund that also does journalism. Or maybe a journalism startup that also runs a hedge fund. 
• Will that work? A new story in the New Yorker wonders if you can combine those things.
• One thing the story makes clear: Having well-connected parents is useful for startup founders.

Can a hedge fund also be an investigative journalism outfit?

That's a provocative question, generated by the existence of Hunterbrook Media, the combination hedge fund/investigative journalism outfit that launched this spring.

The idea in a nutshell: Hunterbrook's small team of investigative journalists look for stories about companies that could also be attractive targets for a hedge fund to invest in or — more likely — bet against. Then the journalists tell Hunterbrook's hedge fund arm about the stories they will publish about the company, so the fund can short the company (or invest in it).

You can read more about that via the New Yorker's Clare Malone's excellent look at Hunterbrook, though it's way too soon to assess how any of this will work.

Read the New Yorker's story on Hunterbrook

Hunterbrook's first big published investigation was into mortgage underwriter United Wholesale Mortgage, and before publication, Hunterbrook's fund went short on UWM and long on rival Rocket Mortgage; a month later, UWM shares are up Rocket is down slightly. ("We're just getting started, but early signs are that it's working," the company told my colleague Bradley Saacks last month.)

But Malone's piece also raises a different question: What kind of background do you need to raise $10 million for a media startup — and $100 million for a hedge fund — these days?

And that one does have an answer: It helps if you are very, very connected.

Malone never uses the epithet "nepo baby" to describe Hunterbrook cofounders Sam Koppelman and Nathaniel Horwitz. But they are indeed people who have successful and well-connected parents: Koppelman's father is screenwriter and TV showrunner Brian Koppelman; Horwitz's mother, Geraldine Brooks, is a much-lauded journalist and author, and so was his father, Tony Horwitz, who died in 2019.

That family history, of course, doesn't automatically convince people to give a couple of 20-something Harvard grads millions of dollars for their first forays into finance and journalism. But it certainly helps them meet people that will eventually do that.

And Malone spells that part out quite clearly:

""Nathaniel and Sam have a pretty ridiculous network," Matthew Termine, one of the Hunterbrook reporters on the U.W.M. investigation, told me. E-mails that Koppelman wrote to the chair of Sony Entertainment about his application to Harvard appeared in the 2014 Sony Pictures leak, as did a note to the school on his behalf from Matt Damon. (Koppelman's father co-wrote "Rounders" and "Ocean's Thirteen.") For a time, he dated the "Euphoria" star Maude Apatow. Horwitz, for his part, once wrote about a series of conversations he had with the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes as her life and company crumbled.

Hunterbrook's advisers include Paul Steiger, the founder of ProPublica, and Daniel Okrent, the first public editor of the Times. Former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Matt Murray and the financial journalist Bethany McLean gave notes on the U.W.M. investigation before publication. Hunterbrook's hedge fund has raised a hundred million dollars, and the company received seed funding from, among others, the venture arm of Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective and the hedge-fund billionaire Marc Lasry, who, Brian Koppelman once told the Financial Times, helped the "Billions" showrunner develop an "understanding of the billionaire psyche."

So, again: None of Horwitz and Koppelmans' family histories and networks will make their company succeed. But it certainly didn't hurt them getting out of the gate.

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• Express filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April, and it's closing 95 branded stores in the US.
• I visited some of its NYC locations to see what the merchandise looks like.
• One analyst said Express failed to adapt to the post-pandemic world of remote work.

Express has been a clothing retailer staple in malls across the US for years but filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April and will close 95 stores.

So, I visited two Express locations destined to shut soon. One thing I found: there's no need to rush to get these deals.

Express was known as a place to get business casual clothes before the boom of remote work in 2020, but the style choices and high prices left me uncertain about exactly who its target audience is in 2024.

That seems to be backed up by Neil Saunders, managing director of retail analysis GlobalData, who told Business Insider:

"The formal and smart-casual market for both men and women has softened over recent years because of a rise from working from home and the casualization of fashion."

He continued: "This puts Express firmly on the wrong side of trends, and, in our view, the chain made too little effort to adapt."

The clothes I saw felt like they were in line with last year's obsessions — like metallic styles as seen at Beyoncé's Renaissance Tour. Everything else also seemed a bit dated. Maybe I, a 24-year-old, am not the target audience, but I noticed that the options didn't fit the "clean girl," "mob wife," or "y2k" aesthetics dominating social media right now.

I also work from home most days, so business casual makes up less than 50% of my wardrobe. But I can't say the slim-leg editor pants from Express fall into my ideal work attire.

The other thing that surprised me when I visited the two soon-to-be-closed locations in New York City was the prices. Even taking 30%-50% off Express's clothes didn't bring items down to a cost I'd see as "affordable" — like H&M or Gap.

Although the signs said, "Everything must go," marking down a $248 blazer to $209 didn't feel more urgent than any other seasonal sale.

Saunders told BI that the clothing at Express "is poor in that it is overpriced, lacks differentiation, and comes across as very bland."

I wouldn't go so far in my description, but I think many styles could be found elsewhere at a much lower price point for the quality.

Meantime, other than the big signs, it looks like business as usual in the Express stores I visited. The sales associate who rang up my items even offered to sign me up for the rewards program.

When asked if it mattered since the store was closing, he said it'd take $10 off my total of $71 for the pair of pants and blue tank top I bought.

An investment group led by brand management firm WHP Global is considering acquiring "a substantial majority" of the company, according to a statement from Express on April 22. Some existing lenders committed $35 million to support ongoing operations.

Representatives for Express declined to comment and directed BI to the news release announcing the filing. CEO Stewart Glendinning has said the company is "taking an important step that will strengthen our financial position."

"Bankruptcy will allow Express to reset the business, including shutting down a number of badly performing stores," Saunders said.

All in all, Express would need some serious overhauling to appeal to a critically online — and dare I say fashion forward — Gen Zer like myself. But it's a good place to stock up on some new job interview clothes at a (small) discount.

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• Russia needs to keep its war with Ukraine going or risk an economic hard landing, Elina Ribakova wrote for the Financial Times.
• The country's military industry has been a major driver of structural economic strength during the war.
• If the conflict ends, a recession could unfold, adding pressure on the Kremlin, Ribakova said.

Russia has seen strong growth lately, but the fate of the nation's economy hangs on whether it can keep militarizing — something only accomplished by keeping the Ukraine war going, a think-tank analyst wrote in the Financial Times.

According to the International Monetary Fund, Russia's GDP is set to considerably outpace other Western economies this year, forecasted to grow 3.2%. But while this may look good on paper, the country is actually at risk of a hard landing if war efforts cease, Elina Ribakova said.

"Contrary to the expectations that economic constraints would hinder Russia's capacity to sustain fighting, the specter of economic collapse might push Vladimir Putin and his officials to double down on militarization and seek further confrontation, even if aggression against Ukraine hits a standstill," the Peterson Institute for International Economics analyst said. 

Since Moscow's Ukraine invasion in 2022, its economic success is chiefly thanks to military-industrial expansions, heavily bolstered by fiscal support from the Kremlin.

According to the senior fellow, direct military spending has more tripled since the war's start, now accounting for 6% of GDP. That number is likely to be much higher, she said, as a large portion of government expenditures are not publicly known.

That's brought profit to regions that have struggled for years, and are now seeing huge upside from the production shift. Local governments are reporting a surge in jobs, production facilities, and enterprises, Ribakova cited.

In total, military-industrial establishments have exploded across the country, rising from 2,000 to 6,000 in the war's timeframe. These employ more than 3.5 million workers.

At this point, the pivot towards war-based growth is structural, and aggression needs to keep up to preserve the economy, she said.

"Reversing the structural investments made in the war will present a monumental challenge. For decades," Ribakova wrote. "Russia has struggled with under-investment and regional inequality, with only a handful of primarily commodity-producing regions being the net contributors to the budget transfer system."

If hostilities were to end, a Russian recession isn't unlikely. To avoid such a conflict at home, this only incentivizes Moscow to keep its fight going:

"Should the authorities attempt to halt militarisation, a hard landing could add pressure to the government, which already resorts to oppression to maintain power," she wrote. "Internal conflicts over limited resources may also intensify."

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